Dirac and Feynman in Poland

The Physics Today carried this photo Dirac and Feynman on the cover
page of its August (1963) issue. The photo was taken by Marek Holzman
during a relativity conference organized by Leopold Infeld in July of
1962. The conference took place at the Jablonna Palace about 20 km
north of Warsaw.

This photo made a so profound impact on the career of one of your
colleagues that he had to make a
pilgrimage to this spot in November of
2013. You are right. I am talking about myself. It is OK if you do not
understand my papers, but you cannot deny the continuity in my publication
list starting from 1961, and I am still writing.

Many of you in the past wrote strong negative referee reports on my papers,
and you will have more opportunities to do so in the future. However,
you have never been able to stop me from doing physics. The reason is
very simple. I believe in these two great physicists.

Both of them were interested in making quantum mechanics consistent
with relativity, but they took different routes with different styles.
Thus, it is a great challenge to every physicist to complete the job of
combining quantum mechanics with relativity by combining the papers
published by them.

We can compare these two physicists in the following table.

Name of Physicist

Dirac

Feynman

Means of Expression

Mathematical Poems

Cartoons and Diagrams

Primary Interest

Bound States, Standing Waves

Scattering States, Running Waves

Personality

Seldom talks to anyone.

Willing to join the crowd anywhere in the
world.

Favorite tools of research

4-by-4 matrices, Harmonic Oscillators

Path integrals, Harmonic Oscillators

What they did not see.

Their physics can be formulated within the
framework of Wigner's representation theory.

The question is how to combine these the approaches made by these two
physicicsts into one physics.
Click here.

Let us now see some photos I took when I was at the Jablonna Palace
in November.

This is a photo of myself standing at the place where
Dirac and Feynman attempted to talk each other.

I am trying to imitate Dirac and Feynman at the same spot, but not
too well. Click here for the photo.

I met Paul A. M. Dirac in 1962.

When Paul A. M. Dirac visited the University of Maryland in October of 1962, I was a
first-year assistant professor, and I had to provide convenience for him. At that
time, I was confused. The Physical Review Letters was constantly sending out new
words, such as Regge poles, N/D method, bootstrap dynamics, strip approximation, etc.
However, to me, they did not sound like the physics I really wanted to do.

I was fortunate enough to spend 30 minutes alone with Dirac. I asked him what
I should do in physics. He said American physicists should spend more time to
understand Lorentz covariance. This was a totally unexpected answer to me.

It took me some time to understand what Dirac was really telling me.
First of all,
by American physicists, did he meet anyone in particular? It was not until after
reading some of Feynman's papers to realize he was talking about Feynman. Dirac was
right, Feynman or his students could have studied Lorentz transformations more
carefully. For instance, the paper with his students

contains many new physical ideas, but it is a total mess from the mathematical point
of view. They could have done much better job if they had studied Wigner's papers
on the Lorentz group.

Only after I read Feynman's papers, I realized Dirac was talking about Feynman when
he said "American physicists."
Dirac and Feynman met in July of 1962 (three months before I met Dirac). They met
in Poland.

How about Dirac's papers? The best way to understand what Dirac told me in
1962 was to read Dirac's own papers. Dirac's papers all sound like poems, but they
do not contain figures. The best way to understand his papers is to translate
all those poems into cartoons. Here are thus my cartoons to tell you what Dirac
told me and what I did.

First of all, let us translate what Dirac told me into a cartoon.

It is quite safe assume that Dirac made many attempts to place something into
this empty space. Indeed, he did in the following papers.

In producing the above results, I needed inputs from various sources.
Click here for the papers I had to study.
In building a house, there are two distinct steps. One is to produce
bricks, cements, and wooden materials. The other step is to design and
construct the house you wish to build.

It was a rewarding experience for me to use the excellent raw materials
provided by the three physicists we all respect.

More Poland Pages

Poland for Koreans. I use Poland
to study my Korean background. I was born in Korea and came
to the United States after high school graduation. This Korean
background has been pivotal in developing my scientific wisdom
in the research world.

copyright@2015 by Y. S. Kim, unless otherwise specified.
The photo of Dirac and Feynman is from the Caltech Photo Archive.
This photo was taken by Marek Holzman during the International
Conference on Relativity Theory of Gravitation in Warsaw (Poland)
on July 25-31 1962, organized by Leopold Infeld. The image of Jesus
and Nicodemus is from "The Picture Bible" (David C. Cook Publishing Co.,
Elgin, Illinois, U.S.A., 1978).